A phoney democracydominated by warlords, drug barons,
oil industry representatives and World Bank administratorshas
now been successfully imposed upon Afghanistan by the world's
major military and economic powers, including Canada. The current
issue of Press for Conversion! outlines the key steps in
the supposedly democratic process" that brought this
government to power. The process began very soon after 9/11, which
offered a convenient pretext needed for the U.S. aerial-bombing
campaign, that began on October 6, 2006. Some 3,000-3,400 innocent
civilians were killed during the first six months of that
U.S. bombardment alone.

Thanks to the subsequent military, financial and diplomatic
efforts of American, Canadian and other NATO-member states, many
of Afghanistans most violent and dreaded terrorists are
now back in power, running the country's government.

This issue of Press for Conversion! highlights the litany
of appalling scandals surrounding the so-called "democratic
process" that aided and abetted this return to power of our
closest allies in Afghanistan, the notoriously-brutal "Northern
Alliance" warlords and their fundamentalist mujahideen militias.

Many Afghan people and organizations are understandably outraged
that this US-led, Canadian-assisted process of "regime change"
was used to replace one a set of murderous, fundamentalist warlords
(the Taliban) with another (the Northern Alliance). One such Afghani
is Malalai Joya. She is among a small handful of MPs who challenge
these warlords in parliament.

Malalai Joya was in Canada to speak at the NDP convention, which
passed a resolution demanding that the Canadian government
withdraw troops from Afghanistan.
We were very fortunate to be able to arrange for Malalai to speak at a public forum
in Ottawa. She was introduced by Richard Sanders, coordinator
of the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade, and editor of its magazine,
Press for Conversion! Read more about her Ottawa talk
here and
here.

Several articles in the new issue of Press
for Conversion! focus on Malalai's struggles to expose
the terrorists and war criminals who have taken over Afghanistan's
parliament, including the government's top cabinet positions:

While Canadian governments (both Liberal and Conservative)
have echoed the U.S. administration in lavishly praising their
own successful installation of this so-called, fledgling democracy
in Afghanistan, they have diligently covered up the fact that
this "regime change" was riddled with widespread and
systematic examples of violence, intimidation and corruption.
This so-called "democratic process," that we imposed
upon Afghanistan, allowed the intimidation by warlords (and their
foreign backers), and included outright vote buying and vote rigging.
The entire process, from the Bonn conference of Afghan delegatesthat
were hand-picked by western powers (2001), through the "emergency
loya jirga (grand council)" (2002), the "constitutional
loya jirga" (2003), to the presidential election (2004) and
the parliamentary elections (2005) was replete with serious examples
of manipulation and corruption that have been studiously ignored
by western governments and the corporate media.

Inspite of all this horror, the now-"stable" regime
in Afghanistan is cloaked in a phoney veneer of respectability
that is lauded by western governments and their corporate partners,
including the mainstream media.